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Day: November 20, 2011

Two University of California, Davis police officers involved in pepper-spraying seated protesters are being placed on administrative leave as the chancellor of the school accelerates the investigation into the incident.

UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi on Sunday said she has been inundated with reaction over the incident, in which an officer dispassionately fires pepper spray on a line of sitting demonstrators.

Video of the incident was circulated widely on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter on Saturday, in which protesters flinch and cover their faces but remain passive with their arms interlocked, as onlookers shriek and scream out for the officer to stop.

The university’s faculty association called on Katehi to resign, saying in a letter there had been a “gross failure of leadership.”

Katehi said she takes “full responsibility for the incident” but has resisted calls for her resignation, instead pledging to take actions to make sure “that this does not happen again.”

At a news conference Saturday, Katehi said what the video shows is, “sad and really very inappropriate.”

“I do not think that I have violated the policies of the institution,” she said. “I have worked personally very hard to make this campus a safe campus for all.”

However, a law enforcement official who watched the clip called the use of force “fairly standard police procedure.”

Katehi remained in a media room for more than two hours after the news conference Saturday, eventually walking to an SUV past a group of students nearly three blocks long who, in a coordinated effort, remained completely silent. The Sacramento Bee said.

Newt Gingrich has amassed a huge amount of “dirt” upon himself and his “brand” in the last 15 years or so. One would think he’d be the last person to talk about “bathing”. Not to mention his (and the GOP) total lack of recognition that the unemployment rate is 9% nationally and way more in local areas around the country.

The real travesty here is that their portrayal of #OWS participants as “dirty hippies” is just plain hyperbole and demagoguery on their part!

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you. Then you win.” ~ Ghandi

“All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything,” Gingrich said at the Thanksgiving Family Forum in Iowa, as noted by Igor Volsky at ThinkProgress. “They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.”

“That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath,'” continued Gingrich, to loud applause from the audience.

The Thanksgiving Family Forum, which was one more opportunity to hear from the GOP presidential candidates, was sponsored by the Family Leader, a group headed by controversial social conservative Bob Vander Plaats.

Notably absent from Saturday’s forum were Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman, who are not campaigning as aggressively in Iowa as some of the other candidates.

In October, Gingrich expressed sympathy with Occupy Wall Street’s concerns about rising student debt, saying, “Is it really fair to young people — or for that matter to middle-aged people who go back to school — to give them an inflated price just because you can borrow the money in the short run? You have to pay that money back, and that becomes a big burden.”

Gingrich also said that people should be mad about the secrecy of the Wall Street bailout.

The birther wars continue. Orly Taitz, birther queen of California, personally filed a complaint in New Hampshire on Saturday that challenged President Obama’s U.S. citizenship and argued for his removal from the state’s ballot,reports the Concord Monitor.

New Hampshire’s electoral governing body, the Ballot Law Commission, turned down the complaint in a public hearing via 5-0 vote. It got pretty ugly shortly thereafter.

“Traitors!” screamed the members of the attending public. “Treason!”

“You have no decency! You have no honesty! You’re committing treason!”

The group of birthers, which included several New Hampshire state representatives, erupted after the decision, shouting at the commission attorneys as they tried to exit the hearing room. Another state representative apparently suggested committee members should cover their face with a mask if they ever found themselves in his district.

In her own report posted here, Orly Taitz assailed the commission as corrupt, citing as evidence the fact that all its members were Democrats.

“The level of corruption was unbelievable,” Taitz said. “We found out that all five members of the committee are Democrats. As I was presenting all of the evidence, people were listening and getting more and more angry.”

If indeed all members of the commission were Democrats, New Hampshire would have a major legal problem. Except Brad Cook, the chair of the commission, is a prominent Republican.

At a press conference in Florida today, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain — whose foreign policy maxim is “peace through strength and clarity” — attempted to clarify his stance on Libya following his epic whiffing of a question on the country this week.

Unfortunately for the former pizza executive, he only muddled things further today. First he attempted to blame the interviewer for not being “specific” enough and for supposedly selectively editing Cain’s response. (Over five uncut minutes of his remarks are visible on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel’s website.) Then, Cain erroneously claimed that the Taliban has taken control in Libya:

Do I agree with siding with the opposition? Do I agree with saying that Qadhafi should go? Do I agree that they now have a country where you’ve got Taliban and Al Qaeda that’s going to be part of the government? … Do I agree with not knowing the government was going to — which part was he asking me about? I was trying to get him to be specific and he wouldn’t be specific.